Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

> But which is worse - letting an abused child slip through the cracks, or take a child away from an innocent family

The foster system does not produce very great results from what I understand, including the chance that a child will be abused by a foster family.

The statistically likely outcomes for a child with a loving family plummet substantially if they go into the foster system

Unfortunately an abused child going into the foster system isn't likely to see their potential outcomes improve by a substantial amount

Therefore, taking a loved child away from an innocent family is way worse and it's not even close

View on HN

Right but unless the decision is "never enter children into the foster system," then there will be a decision boundary that results in some amount of both false positives and false negatives[1]. We can, like you allude to, adjust the boundary to weigh them differently.

How would you relatively weigh the cost of false negatives to false positives? The relative benefit of true positive to true negatives? 1:10, 1:100, 1:1000?

1. There's likely some other statistical assumptions I'm glossing over, but I'll leave that to someone more knowledgeable about that than I

> How would you relatively weigh the cost of false negatives to false positives

Imagine having a loving family that treats you super well and being taken away from them.

Then imagine being placed in another home with new people you don't know, with new rules and attitudes that haven't evolved organically with you as you've grown. Now you start to get in trouble for stuff you used to do that your parents didn't care about, because the new parents don't have the same tolerance for the same things

That's not even that bad really

Imagine having siblings who throw the fact you're adopted in your face when they're mad at you

Or having foster parents that actually are abusers themselves, but they're better at not being caught.

I don't think you can really truly calculate the potential harm that taking a loved child from a healthy family and placing them into foster care could do

I have imagined all of those and still conclude that they need to be compared in order to weigh the pros and cons of making the decision.

If one makes such a decision without weighing the tradeoffs, they're being negligent.

If they refuse to make the decision, then they're choosing to never place abused children in foster care which is one of the options in the decision process, so they're still making a decision. There is no escape hatch.

I'd encourage you to do the same imaginative thought experiment for the kid who's in an abusive bio-family. Would it change how you decide?

At no point am I advocating for not removing abused children from their abusive circumstances and placing them in foster care

However the bar for that decision making needs to be very high

There is no room for false positives in this system. If that requirement leads to paralyzing the system, then the system is broken and needs to be changed

children should never be taken away from their parents unless the children's life is in danger, or the children are clearly fearing their parents. in other words, simply ask the children, observe the situation and collect evidence.

the well-being of the children needs to be the first concern, and it needs to be understood that separating children from their parents against their will is detrimental to the children's well-being because can hurt the children more than the abuse they receive from their parents (unless the abuse is actually life threatening)

most children will not have a problem to stay with other people for a while if they are given a choice. at least the older ones who understand what is going on.

for parents with young children, i believe the better approach is family therapy or living under supervision.

but these things can only be done if we as a society accept that these are cases of mental illness, and instead of punishment these people need help.

There will always be some false positives In a system. The only option without them is no system at all.

The question is how many are acceptable. 10:1? 10,000:1?

Are you essentially arguing that false positives have an infinite cost?

That strikes me as too close to Pascal's Wager to end in rational conclusions.

No false positives is an unreasonably high standard, as it no false negative. For example, children do sometimes lie, or they claim abuse when there isn't any when under the influence of other adults who distort the child's notion of what constitutes abuse. Perfection is not attainable, whether false positives or false negatives are concerned. Mistakes will happen. You cannot assume the worst as a precaution, nor ignore evidence that strongly suggests abuse. We cannot control the world. Lots of crime happens that is never punished, sometimes because of the neglect of the state, but also sometimes because chasing down every crime does more harm than good. In the case of child abuse, an overbearing state with oversensitive notions of child abuse is dangerous. The state must accept its limitations and mind the common good.

The question is a matter of having sufficient evidence, taking precautionary measures proportional to the evidence of abuse when it makes sense, and the use of prudential judgement. The last one is unavoidable. The law is not a mechanically applied algorithm. It is something that requires good judgement. The most important things are sound abuse laws, and competent people with good judgement who have a good understanding of abuse and the law.

This statement seems to be based on a false premise that foster care is bad care (it is often very good care where I originate from, UK) and ignores the fact that sometimes parents kill their children and that there are many children in desperate need of help.

The greater problem with the CPS or similar agencies is underfunding. This leads to families only having dealings with them when the circumstances are suspected of being dire, rather than CPS having the resources to support parents in a meaningful way over a meaningful period of time. Such meaningful support helps to reduce the need for more drastic interventions and allows social workers to have much more knowledge of the families they are helping and of when interventions are needed.

it's not the foster care that is the problem. even if the foster parents are perfect, separating children from their parents against their will is causing severe trauma to the children and often hurting them more than what the parents might do to them.

i agree with your second paragraph. the focus needs to be on supporting parents to take better care of their children.

I knew a guy who was a surgeon at a big children's hospital. He said that, if a kid came in with damage from abuse, and they didn't detect it and intervene, the odds were 50% that the next time they saw the child, it would be dead.

I'm not sure that taking a loved child and putting it in the foster system is worse than missing an abused child and leaving it with the abusing family.

So I categorically dispute that "taking a loved child away from an innocent family is way worse and it's not even close".

> I knew a guy who was a surgeon at a big children's hospital. He said that, if a kid came in with damage from abuse, and they didn't detect it and intervene, the odds were 50% that the next time they saw the child, it would be dead.

If I interpret this charitably, maybe they only saw the worst of the worst because of their position as a surgeon?

If I interpret this less than charitably, you are implying that a single incidence of child abuse has about 50% fatality rate. This would be simply false. You don't have to go back further in time than 40 years, and it was commonplace for pretty much everybody to beat their children. If 50% was an actual fatality rate for a single incidence, population worldwide would have dwindled due to these fatalities.

I think it's like this: If there is child abuse serious enough to require hospitalization, and the authorities don't intervene at that time, the next instance of child abuse serious enough to come to the attention of the authorities has a 50% chance of being fatal. (So I guess that I'm agreeing with your "worst of the worst" interpretation.)

In the case in question, the kid was already in the hospital. So at that point, we're at the "worst of the worst" situation... if it's abuse. So they want to be really sure whether it's abuse.

Note well: This is not to defend CPS for the things they did in this case. I am merely saying that this is why CPS wants to look very carefully at such cases.

It depends on perspective and who's making the judgment. It is absolutely worse for the love child.

I think it's questionable if a third party has a right to judge and take action

So by your argument CPS just…shouldn’t do anything? If foster care for an abused child won’t help, then what’s the point?

If they aren't absolutely beyond any doubt certain that the child is being neglected or abused, then yes of course they shouldn't do anything

Their job is to protect at risk kids, not just shuffle kids to new homes

The damage that a false positive would do to a child is unfathomable

The foster system does overall help abused children, but fostered kids don't have as good outcomes in general as non-fostered kids

Man, I dunno how opiod-crisis-adjacent you are, but I am very close to it.

I cannot imagine that relocating a child to their grandparents is automatically worse than letting them stay in a home that stinks of burnt heroine, where their trash-bag full of laundry for the relocation stinks of urine.

To clarify, I'm talking about outcomes of children who are in families that aren't abusing them, versus children who have been placed in foster care (for any reason)

Comparing outcomes of children who are being abused against children in foster care will show improvement generally. But there's still a pretty wide gap between their outcomes and the outcomes of children in healthy families

Also, do grandparents really count as "the foster system"?

At least in my state (Washington), CPS prefers to relocate kids to nearby family members over actual foster homes, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

There is always a balancing of false-positives vs. false-negatives, in any attempt to restrict any behavior. And while I agree that the consequences of the false-positives are dire, sometimes unthinkable, CPS and its power to remove children from their homes is in response to something also dire and unthinkable.

You seem to be arguing that the consequences of a false positive vastly outweigh the consequences of a false negative. Viewing the consequences of an admittedly light-duty false negative (that is, abuse or neglect that, for one reason or another, hasn't received a CPS response), and being on the periphery of another much worse false negative (via contact with a member of the jury), I am uncertain.

Which is worse? Lacking the power to remove a child from a bad situation, or occasionally sending a child into a bad situation? I don't have a good answer for that question. I just disagree with the idea that either is indisputably worse than the other.

Its awful that there is a situation that we have to choose at all. And unambiguously, the foster system must be reformed. The OP even quotes the family's lawyer as saying that CPS disproportionately goes after poorer families ("neglect" and "poverty" can look the same, even if the cause is wildly different). But I do not think the foster system is so broken that we should abolish CPS entirely and just accept actual child abuse as unpreventable.

> But I do not think the foster system is so broken that we should abolish CPS entirely and just accept actual child abuse as unpreventable

I have not advocated for that anywhere.

> Which is worse? Lacking the power to remove a child from a bad situation, or occasionally sending a child into a bad situation

Actively using power to make someone's life worse is worse than failing to use power to make someone's life better. Even if the power is used with all of the best intentions

That's why the road to hell is paved with those

i don't see the problem in the foster system itself (yes the system may have issues, but that's another topic)

the problem is that fostering in most cases is the wrong way to help those children. instead the parents need help. but that help needs to be provided in a way such that parents and children can stay together.

but that is not what is done. instead the children are taken away and the parents are left to themselves: go fix your problems, and then you can have your children back.

pretty much the only cases where fostering is the right choice is where children are in actual danger or the parents need to go to prison for serious crimes.

I think the point is rather that the system should skew extremely heavily towards inaction. For example is better to let 10 children die than falsely rehome 1.

The comment you are replying to talks about "false positive vs false negative optimization". Are there cases where CPS should just not do anything because the probability of abuse is so low? Yes. If you are implying that we should take "no chances", then CPS should just take everybody's children away from them. After all, there's always more than 0% chance that someone is beating their child.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com